Friday Cat Blogging – 22 November 2013


Five quilts to go! Our year of quiltblogging is almost over. Today’s quilt doesn’t have a name, but Marian calls it a picnic quilt because it’s squarish and a bit of an odd size. So you should summon up a mental image of this quilt laid out in a park and covered with delicious lunchtime goodies. That’s probably what Domino is doing in this picture. In any case, it’s constructed out of 1930s repro charm squares, and it’s machine pieced and machine quilted.

In local cat news, an LA city councilman wants to allow Angelenos to own five cats, up from the currently allowed three. I have a suspicion that no one has ever paid much attention to this law in the first place, but hooray anyway. Next up: the feline council will be considering a proposal that raises the minimum number of human servants per cat. It’s expected to pass easily.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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